Search Area Is Expanded For Remains From Sept. 11

By DAVID W. DUNLAP

Published: October 28, 2006

The Bloomberg administration said yesterday that it would cast a net well beyond ground zero, from Broadway to the Hudson River, from the bottom of manholes to the top of nearby skyscrapers, in its search for human remains from Sept. 11, 2001.

The chief medical examiner is to inspect the roofs of the Millenium Hotel and 1 Liberty Plaza, opposite the World Trade Center site. Tiny bone fragments may be found there, mixed in with the stone ballast, as they were atop the former Deutsche Bank building, according to a report prepared for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.

Key downtown redevelopment agencies have headquarters in the 53-story Liberty Plaza tower. It is also where victims' family members can visit privately in a room set aside for them on the 20th floor.

The largest potential search site is the four-block-long, 60-foot-wide service road between the trade center pit and West Street. Dozens of bones and bone fragments have been found in the last week and a half in an abandoned, damaged manhole that had been buried under several feet of fill.

A layer of trade center debris may still exist between the original roadway and the current service road, said the report by David J. Burney, the commissioner of the Department of Design and Construction, and Charles J. Maikish, the executive director of the Lower Manhattan Construction Command Center.

An expanded search may take a year or longer, Deputy Mayor Edward Skyler said. At times, it will require the overnight closing of some lanes of West Street. He said he could not estimate the cost.

''We are going to search high and low for anything we can find,'' Mr. Skyler said, ''and if the result of all this work is only one more remain or one more piece of personal property, it will still have been worth it.''

Family members said the proposed measures did not go far enough. For instance, they said workers ought to dig up the whole service road rather than conduct exploratory excavations as recommended. And they called again for the city to relinquish its role to the federal Joint P.O.W.-M.I.A. Accounting Command, which recovers and identifies service members who have been killed in action.

''Doing more of the same wrong thing in a larger area cannot serve any useful purpose,'' said Sally Regenhard. She has yet to recover her son, Christian, who was killed in the 2001 terrorist attack.

But Mr. Skyler said the city had the experience and the forensic anthropologists needed to do the job, including two veterans of the accounting command. ''The same expertise that JPAC would bring to the table, the city has,'' he said.

Another site where trade center debris may be found, the report said, is the small block between Liberty and Cedar Streets. St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church stood there until 9/11, when it was destroyed by the collapse of 2 World Trade Center. No buildings are there now.

Inspection is also warranted, the report said, at Fiterman Hall, a badly damaged building north of ground zero that is to be demolished, and 130 Cedar Street, south of ground zero, which is to be renovated.

The report called for the visual inspection of as many as 500 subterranean structures -- manholes, service boxes, valve chambers and cable-splicing chambers -- between Broadway and the Hudson River and Barclay and Albany Streets. If trade center debris is found, the report said, the chief medical examiner should be called in to sift it.

Mayor Bloomberg went further and said that any extraneous material, like silt, should be removed and sifted by the medical examiner. He accepted the rest of the report.

Photo: Construction workers removed manhole covers along a service road at ground zero this week in a renewed search for 9/11 body parts. (Photo by Patrick Andrade for The New York Times)